Wed Apr 02, 2014 at 13:34:03 PM EDT

Here's your most damning paragraph in any state media outlet today. It's about the line of horseshit Michigan's finest legal mind keeps feeding the media, which itself doesn't show much interest in following up on.

For this reason, attorney generals in Virginia, Oregon, Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania, California, and Illinois have dropped their defenses of state marriage bans. Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said, “I cannot and will not defend a law that violates Virginians’ fundamental constitutional rights.” And the U.S. solicitor general declined, at the behest of the Obama administration, to defend the Defense of Marriage Act before it was partially struck down last summer in the U.S. v. Windsor decision.

This is the paragraph immediately after mentioning that the U.S. attorney general sent message to each state attorney general that are bound to defend a law they conclude is unConstitutional. We also know that this has been applied successfully. The president decided not to defend DOMA as inherently unConstitutional, and conservatives went apeshit over his decision to only enforce laws he liked until the Supreme Court agreed with his interpretation. In other words, the president's decision saved a bunch of taxpayer dollars because it rightfully interpreted the constitutionality of a federal law. Michigan's finest legal mind had that same right, to draw conclusions about a Michigan law and whether to devote taxpayer resources to defend it or let it die. He chose to spend taxpayer dollars to defend it.

Speaking of which, I'm reminded of the horseshit line his spokesperson offered the media the other day, that wages of staff attorneys are somehow not taxpayer dollars spent defending this law because they are staff attorneys. I give you a paragraph from the same link embedded in the last post about Thunderdome.

Closing Thunderdome is just part of a major north-of-$100-million cost cutting initiative that is putting the best glow on some tough financials. The reason for the sale: Despite CEO John Paton’s aggressive remaking of the company, Alden’s investments in cheap newspaper company shares (“The Demise of Lean Dean Singleton’s Departure and the Rise of Private Equity”) haven’t worked out the way private equity bets are supposed to.

Thunderdome was a chiefly internal thing. People were hired to work on it. On the company's ledger, the people hired to work on it are included as part of labor costs. Everyone who works for the company or government agency, no matter what they are doing, are part of that company's labor costs. When the company lays people off, those costs come out of the general price of labor. So when you task people you have hired to work on something in particular, you are spending labor dollars on whatever it is that you told them to do. How many people in the office of the attorney general worked on this and how long did they do it? Those are taxpayer dollars spent the same as if those persons were just people brought in to offer "expert" opinions. The same can be said of whatever office supplies were used, the utility costs to keep the lights on where they worked, court fees and every other common cost in litigating the case. And, those costs will go up when they defend this law on appeal, and will go up dramatically if they go before the Supreme Court.

This isn't difficult stuff, folks. If you buy that $40,000 is the beginning and end of the costs of this, you are being badly buffaloed.